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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 8, 2024

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I can't look at modern Western societies and think: This has gone great! In fact, considering the technological advancements that have been made, I have a hard time imagining things going worse short of a more immediate mass extinction event like a nuclear war or pandemic.

This is just a gross failure of imagination. Would you trade places with any contemporary non westerner, or any premodern?

The worst things you can say about the modern West is that 1. we are so fabulously rich that basic living necessities are essentially free and so we plow all of our surplus into zero sum positional goods. 2. We demand such a high quality of life that we continually push our institutions to eliminate the n-th signma risk of living past the point of diminishing returns.

About half the word is either white or East Asian. There is plenty of "high quality" genetic stock of that's what you care about.

lost every single day in the coming decades will never be replaced.

This genetic stock wasn't present at the start of the universe. It was created out of nothing by selection effects. Equivalently high quality genetic pools can be created if they are adaptive

No, I would not want to trade places with the people who had to suffer for millennia to get to the place the west is today. Which is why I really don't like it when we squander those hard fought gains via man made genetic bottlenecks.

You seem to be, as centrists are want to do, ignoring the contention being made and the problems being pointed out and instead framing yourself as a defender of western civilization. The problem I have with that framing, outside of it being a dishonest rhetorical cope, should be obvious. I am not against the flourishing of European people. I like the modern comforts I have. I like the low risk high reward society afforded to me via technological advancement and high trust.

The reason I have a problem with centrism is because I don't want to lose all this good and I very much implied this in my previous post.

The worst things you can say about the modern West is that

It causes a genetic bottleneck that kills itself off. You need something self aware that offsets the problems caused by all the technological advancement. There are historical figures and movements that understood this, and centrists love to sneer at them. Going so far as to cast the doom of the western people in a salvageable light rather than admit they're wrong.

About half the word is either white or East Asian. There is plenty of "high quality" genetic stock of that's what you care about.

Most places on earth have people with many great qualities. East Asia, maybe, in particular. However, I don't want to live in China, Korea or Japan. I want to live where I live now and I want my future descendants to be afforded the same luxury. I am very much not in favor of introducing the sort of status and award obsessed 'Asian' into my immediate environment. It leads to the same toxic study and work culture on display in those countries and I very much prefer mine over theirs.

This genetic stock wasn't present at the start of the universe. It was created out of nothing by selection effects. Equivalently high quality genetic pools can be created if they are adaptive

I very much don't want a repeat of the horrible history of the European man. To suggest this makes you more radical and unhinged than anything I heard of outside of maybe Mao's alleged boasting of Chinas suitability to survive in the chance of a total nuclear war. "What if they killed 300 million of us? We would still have many people left.".

There are historical figures and movements that understood this, and centrists love to sneer at them. Going so far as to cast the doom of the western people in a salvageable light rather than admit they're wrong.

You’re being coy here, but in other comments you’ve been more explicit that you think we should look to the National Socialists for a model. Now, I’m happy to point out the things the Third Reich got right, and their interest in eugenics is probably the best argument for not totally discarding their legacy.

That being said, the legitimacy of their eugenic project is severely compromised by the fact that arguably the central thrust of it was rounding up massive numbers of Jews - a very high-quality population with a proven track record of great achievements, both in Germany and beyond - and causing their deaths via either negligence or outright murder, depending on which sources you believe.

This is compounded by the fact that they clearly expressed a desire to take military actions which they readily expected to lead to the deaths of some substantial number of white Slavs, another population who, while at that time not quite on par with the Germanic peoples due to a bunch of factors we can debate, were clearly at worst a near-peer brother civilization to the rest of Europe. Even casting the Reich’s foreign policy in the best light by presenting it as a noble war against Bolshevism, you’re still left questioning just how much destruction they were willing to visit upon the populations of Eastern Europe in order to achieve such an aim.

All of this to say, you might want to attempt a bit more empathy regarding the specific reasons why intelligent people who share your basic goals and values might still think that the fascists were and are a terrible and counterproductive model for the achievements of those goals and the furtherance of those values. One can believe that eugenics is a fundamentally good and important project while being reasonably squeamish about the specific actions historically taken in the interest of that project, as well as reasonably suspicious of some of the ulterior motives held by the most visible and historically-impactful proponents of the project.

Most places on earth have people with many great qualities. East Asia, maybe, in particular. However, I don't want to live in China, Korea or Japan. I want to live where I live now and I want my future descendants to be afforded the same luxury. I am very much not in favor of introducing the sort of status and award obsessed 'Asian' into my immediate environment. It leads to the same toxic study and work culture on display in those countries and I very much prefer mine over theirs.

What about a synthesis of both cultures, which incorporates the best aspects of both and seeks to sand off the worst and most obsolete aspects of each culture? I would argue that modern Japan and Korea are already a sort of prototype version of this: Western military occupation and cultural-political influence has, since the 1940s and 50s, already been moving those countries in a more Westernized direction; however, they’ve married those Western influences to the core Eastern aspects of their society, producing something that is in a great many ways superior to both extremes. It really is a best-of-both-worlds situation. Now, I agree that this process is incomplete, and that some parts of those cultures still need ironing out; I agree that the work/study culture is too extreme. That being said, there are many ways I would like to see Western cultures become more like Asian ones.

I think that a long-term melding of West and East is unequivocally the best outcome for not only both cultural spheres, but for humanity as a whole. Perhaps influenced overmuch by the black-and-white thinking of the National Socialists, you seem to be trapped in an either/or framing, in which one culture’s norms must be jealously guarded against influence by another. I think that’s the wrong approach. The ubermensch in my mind is a hapa race of diligent, creative, orderly but passionate, aristocratic in spirit without allowing status obsession to crowd out virtue, maintaining the capacity for violence while still holding it at arm’s length. For that to happen, some Asians are going to have to show up in Western societies and be able to do their thing; ditto for whites in Asian societies. Unlike you, I do not perceive this as an invasion by those who will wreck something precious about my society. (Note that I have said unabashedly that there are many groups whom I perceive as dangerous invaders; I just don’t see East Asians as one of them.)

Sometimes saying less is better as it steers the conversation away from irrelevant tangents and arguments. But here we are.

I don't view the holocaust as a strike against National Socialism any more than I view Asian American concentration camps during WW2 as a roadblock in the way of hapa ubermench supremacy. I find the association and repeat regurgitation of those kind of arguments incredibly stupid. It almost pushes me to a point where I no longer believe dialog on a policy level is possible since most people seem completely incapable of not talking about the holocaust. To top it all of, people feel very emboldened to make stuff up about the Third Reich. It's a bad guy that no one except a bad guy will defend. So you can make simple untrue statements that feel true due to emotional association with pop media whilst being completely devoid of any historical context.

On that end I am almost pushed to abandon any political thought and just start talking about the holocaust and how it's a ridiculous fairytale. The numbers really don't matter. 600 or 6 million, it's an animating myth for a victimary narrative. It's a black person speaking out against white supremacy since slavery used to be a thing. It really doesn't matter how many slaves there were, what color, who dunnit first or whatever else. Anyone can see how idiotic all of that is until its their own victimary narrative. Then people act out the exact same pathology without blinking an eye.

As for the EuroAsian synthesis, I don't see how there will be a synthesis, only a temporary transition period. Even assuming no outsider immigration, which is happening in all countries mentioned, Europe is taking in East Asians whilst China is not. The trickle of DNA goes one way. So it's just a matter of time before the European stops being hapa and just becomes Han.

I mean, I can imagine a world where every Asian and every European is married to one another with hapa children. But taking your vision without reservation and as valid in full, you will have to go much further than National Socialism to find any mechanism to turn that vision into reality. On that end, I take very little solace in the thought considering where things are today in the real world.

All of this to say, you might want to attempt a bit more empathy regarding the specific reasons why intelligent people who share your basic goals and values might still think that the fascists were and are a terrible and counterproductive model for the achievements of those goals and the furtherance of those values. One can believe that eugenics is a fundamentally good and important project while being reasonably squeamish about the specific actions historically taken in the interest of that project, as well as reasonably suspicious of some of the ulterior motives held by the most visible and historically-impactful proponents of the project.

I don't know what a fascist is and I don't know what 1940's Germany at war has to do with any of National Socialist policies I like. I really wish the intelligent people could engage with the topic of group bias and western policy flaws without defaulting to the holocaust but so far, they just don't. It's hard for me to empathize with them when they all display the same lack of reason and skepticism. Going through the same pathological motions every single time.

I'm not a smart guy. But I have a decent memory and cognitive dissonance hits me like a truck. So how can I still be here after a decade of making the same argument to all the smartest people I know? Did a swastika fall on my head when I was a toddler? Am I just retarded? Where is the light?

I mean, I certainly did not see it after the Oct 7 attack, where intelligent posters started nonchalantly floating ideas of genociding their enemy and such like it was just another day in the office. It certainly felt like a change from much of the dispassionate commentary on other conflicts. Almost like every single thing I say about group bias and pathology is correct and that being governed by people who don't ingroup me is very bad and leads to sub par outcomes for me? Nay, perhaps I should just listen to my elders and recognize why a slow death is the smart thing because the holocaust. Maybe I can entertain myself with ideas of EuroAsian paradise whilst housing prices inexplicably rise for the 240th month in a row. Almost as if immigrant paradise, promised by similar people, did not come to pass either. No really, all snark aside, can the smart people give me anything tangible as an alternative to a dysgenic society funneling into a massive genetic bottleneck?